How many have experienced "memory leak" problems?

[Flak]

Well, I have run a few more tests. Some disturbing results. What I did:

1. Started pumping out units
2. Put all workers on automatic (you controlled of those manually?!?!).
3. Went through a couple of turns.

I monitored my memory the entire time. The CivIV.exe never went over 270 Mb. My 'Gauranteed Memory' made it all the way to 1.1 Gb, but never spiked, even during certain slowdowns I will mention now:

1. Going into smaller less developed city screens was slow, but definitely faster than going into any of the bigger more established. Once I went into one city, taking well over a minute for the screen to come up, no subsequent screen took longer that 45 seconds.

2. Ending turns took 4 minutes! For me, this is astonishing. On my games, this never even took a minutes, and I had a lot more units than you did.

3. Pumping out units seemed to make no difference. I had some other issues with this sudden abundance of units, but that is a personal preference thing.

4. That first scroll was always the worst. After that, it really smoothed out. But I did still get some occasional stutters. Again, I've never experienced this on any of my huge map games.

5. The most disturbing thing of all for me: The game took over 3 minutes to 'unload'! Even though the game screen was completely gone, and I had total control over the PC, the .exe was still chomping up 200+ Mb and the 'Guaranteed Memory' was still over a 1 Gb for atleast a minute. This slowly eased until the CivIV.exe got down to about 50 Mb, and then shutdown completely. The Gaurantee Memory likewise got back down to it's normal 270ish size. During this three minutes, any other programs I opened and minimized reacted slowly and were kind of choppy until the .exe finally had relieved itself. Then everything went back to normal speed and smoothness.

I've never seen such behavior in any program I've put on this machine, not even CivIV. I sure hope they get this cleaned up. You know I'm really wondering now if they don't have some dedicated code to just cleaning up afterwords, maybe even during the game, that is perhaps a source of some of some of these problems?

 

[phalzyr]

Sorry I didn't come back to this thread until just now. Anyway, I loaded up your game and I have a few observations:

1. It took over 5 minutes to load the game up. None of my previous saves, though few, have take more than 3 minutes.

2. The game actually choked up and froze for a minute or so when I tried to zoom out. I'd never had any problems with this before.

3. I lost the ability to move across the map holding down the left click button while zoomed out.

4. Major slowdown when going into the city screen.

5. I got a message that I had never gotten before saying that my virtual RAM setting was too low and that it was being automatically increased. Once that happened, issues 2, 3, and 4 went away. Then the game was as smooth as ever.

6. After I shutdown CivIV, the executable continued to run! It ran for another 90 seconds slowly decreasing its RAM usage, until it finally shutdown completely. I've never seen that behavior before and I have been watching on several occasions, especially the huge-map-all-civs ones, just to see how clean it shuts down.

.

If Civ is only using 260 some MB what is taking up the other 700+?

1. Woah... Now I have something for comparisons when people say that, this map took me like 20 seconds to load if that...

5. The OS will have a long pause whenever it tries to increase swap file size taht is why most people will suggest setting the minimum and high at same around 2GB if you have the HD space for it.

6. This is because it has to clear out the part it used in the swap file, which was probably more than norm and this takes time is that where the other 700MB came from?

I have 1GB of ram myself and only saw 800 soemthing total commitment when his map was loaded...Strange how cruel this game can be memory wise...BTW with nothing running, but OS, I have 134MB or so commitement...

 

[Harkonnen]

Flak
Civ4 consumes about 700Mb of memory for itself. 250-260Mb are used by XP, and it's usual value for XP once it's loaded. So this is the reason of 1Gb overall virtual memory (1Gb in RAM + some bytes swapped out).

I faced sometimes slow unloading. Though, it doesn't always happen.

Were your other huge maps terra maps as well? Just 'Terra' provides more tiles on 'huge' than any other map type. I.e. map type affects actual number of tiles, even if both are huge.

Also, 'Terra' provides less ocean squares than 'Continental' or any other map type (except probably Pangea, but Terra is still larger).

So far I see most memory consumption coming from terrain and improvements. I can "forgive" terrain because rivers, nice river banks and such can actually make every tile unique in its appearance. But I just don't see why improvements need ~100Mb of vertex data.... It looks like every stinking farm (especially with round corners in industrial age) is like an outside view of some Doom3 map.